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iPhone 6 Takes Another Performance Hit with Spectre Update

Apple is no stranger to being in the spotlight, with its recent reveal of throttling phones to protect older batteries being not too positive for the company. On top of that, there was a recent discovery that there were significant security vulnerabilities associated with Meltdown and Spectre that needed to be remedied.

Apple quickly launched a software update designed to patch the flaw in the iOS 11.2.2 software update, but performance on the iPhone 6 took a severe hit after users updated, something that should be considered if you’re contemplating if you need an iPhone repair service. A tech management blog created by computer user Melv1n, an individual with over a decade of tech product experience, reported that after updating an iPhone 6 to the latest software, he experienced a 41 percent performance reduction. This number was based on single-core benchmark scores.

It was expected that there would be some level of performance reduction in the fix, since the exploit was designed to manipulate and take advantage of “speculative execution mechanisms” on the CPU itself. This leads to the conclusion that there are very significant and serious hardware issues that are currently present in a variety of Intel and ARM-powered devices all over the globe.

The benchmark scores cited were done before and after the Spectre update without any other applications running in the exact same scenario for both tests. GeekBench’s score showed that the single-core test showed performance drops of 41 percent, while multi-core performance was only slightly better at a 39 percent reduction. Further tests were conducted to examine how the update impacted other hardware and functions inside the device.

One of these, HTML 5 DOM performance, experienced a 56 percent decrease with single-core and 36 percent decrease with multi-core testing. The Document Object Model or DOM is used to render the HTML content and graphics through JavaScript in the web browser. It isn’t surprising, given that Apple specifically mentioned in their press release that there were vulnerabilities that needed to be addressed in the update due to how the flaw impacted the use of JavaScript.

These numbers show that significant performance reductions occur after the update, but they may also be due to related factors. It’s possible that other benchmark tests would create different numbers, while the well-known battery throttling controversy could be yet another reason for a decrease in the phone’s performance.